Could it be? Is it even remotely possible? Has a major videogame publisher truly decided to make a sequel to one of its best-selling games? O brave new world, that has such speculation in’t.

Bethesda alternating between Elderses and Falloutses seemed pretty much a given to me, so when talk arose around a URL apparently bought by Bethesda and entitled ‘Survivor 2299‘, a return to the post-apocalypse was far from a surprise. Whether the website really is anything to do with Bethesda remains open to interpretation, but even if it isn’t you should feel free to smack me around the chops with a rainbow trout and call me Charlie McArse if we don’t start hearing official talk of Fallout 4 within the next year.
The Survivor 2299 site includes a timer, counting down to December 11 this year. Many are pointing out that the hellishly meatheaded Dew’n’Doritos carnival of marketing that is the Spike VGA awards is due on Dec 7, and has traditionally played home to Bethesda announcement, so perhaps there’s something in it. Bethesda has refused to comment on inquires about the potential teaser-site; much as trying to extract blood from a no comment stone is a futile business at the best of times, this does seem like a case where surely there’d be no harm in them decrying a fake if it was a fake. Then again, maybe they’ve learned the wisdom of a no-comment over a flat denial after that unfortunate Press Sneak Fuck business.

Reddit sleuths are worried that the Survivor 2299 site has been registered using a different system to Bethesda’s usual, while NeoGAF has traced a trail to Poland, and as such there’s a strong chance it could all be a tiresome and exceptionally pointless prank, but for now it’s anyone’s guess. The Fallout subreddit is busily gathering small mountains of evidence for and against, so keep an eye if you like. The annoying morse code on the site, by the way, is reiterating the Dec 11 date.

I’m actually thinking, maybe we could skip the Bethesda game this time and just go straight for Obsidian’s one, and let Bethesda do the next TES game. Then when the two come out in the same year we can all just stock up on cans and water bottles and not come out of our rooms for the next couple of years. :D

Bethesda can do the world building. They do that better than anyone else in the industry, which is why many of us couldn’t give less of a damn about the story and animation in their games. If you want a big, explorable sandbox full of interesting stuff they’re your guys. Ultimately, that’s why I’ve spent vastly more time in FO3 than I ever will in NV, despite NV being the better Fallout game in every other way.

Yes, I’ve played NV precisely once and FO3 + Skyrim a handful of times each. Hopefully Obsidian’s quickstarter allows them to run their own IP into the ground instead of wandering from publisher to publisher in search of table scraps.

First off, Dark One, in case you’re the same person here as on the Nexus – and I am reasonably certain you are – thanks for all you do for these communities. Mods are, literally, the only thing that kept me playing Bethesda games as long as I did. And the Nexus is a huge part of that. I am – occasionally – there under the same screen name. Excellent work you folks do. Thanks!

Also, I could not agree more about the Obsidian sequel. As others have said, I wish we could just skip straight to it. While I actually enjoyed the blasted-city atmosphere of FO3 more than civilized Mojave of FO:NV, the latter was the better written, more immersion-oriented game by far.

I hope it really is inevitable. That Obsidian and Bethesda both thought the collaboration was fruitful enough to warrant doing again. Not everyone liked both FO3 and New Vegas, but when you’ve got real choices it becomes hard to begrudge giving the devs your money.

I love both games, but my god was New Vegas glitchy! I prefer Fallout 3’s setting; exploring the ruins of DC in a Fallout 3 modded to hell and back was an amazing experience. New Vegas on the other hand offered the freedom I sometimes missed in Fallout 3, and being a fan of Wasteland for almost 25 years it was nice to make a return to the desert.

I just started playing New Vegas again (I only played through it once, and I had none of the DLC then), and it’s even better than I remembered..

Usually I too show severe allergic reactions when confronted with some new hype, but in this case: yes. YES! I need it!

Seriously, no other game has triggered so many replays with my friends (usually one gamemaster and spectators with decision privileges) like the fallout series. Yes, 1, 2, 3, and New Vegas.
I really really hope they take some deserved time on this project so it will become as solid as the others (no, even MORE solid than the others as one can argue about the shortcomings of New Vegas)

Shame. You missed out on some great mods, not just graphical tweaks but hours of quality extra gameplay. The community around any TES game is awesome. Would highly recommend a steam purchase as the workshop makes adding most mods a breeze

We must have different interpretations of the word ‘great’. The engine is ancient and has been worked over so many times it’s like some kind of Frankenstein that’s been added to over the years. You can still see the original stitching underneath.

Seriously, it’s had a good run and Bethesda have made enough dough to invest in building something new from the ground up. I really hope they did, though I won’t hold my breath. They’re a lazy bunch.

Seriously, the whole “internal areas are completely distinct zones” thing is really, really starting to show its limitations now. Take assaulting Caesar’s tent in FO:NV, for example, which is made arbitrarily hard by forcing you to engage at close range where by world logic there’s no reason you couldn’t throw open the curtain, lob in a grenade, then back off to pick off any survivors with rifles.

Also the creepy frozen-time conversations where people can’t emote beyond the odd facial muscle, and other engine limitations which do things like mean Veronica will never wear the dress she begs the player for. The lack of a car (a regression from FO2, although someone modded one back in—and they have what look like working bikes in the setting, you just can’t ride them). It’s crippling the ability of the gameplay/narrative designers to do things, and that means it has to be reworked or replaced far more than any degree of not-enough-graphics. It says something that I was impressed they managed to do a Vertibird in it—that really shouldn’t have to be a “you pulled that off in this?” moment. For pity’s sake, in that same section, it has to fade to black to let you climb ladders. And the “limited crowd for security reasons” is something like three people turning up for this big presidential speech. They were literally outnumbered by the rangers standing guard.

The empty casinos in new vegas really turned me off. Here you are, wondering through the desert, being told how great and spectacular and dangerous NV would be, then you turn up and there’s a handful of gamblers in giant casino halls.

I know you say below you haven’t played Skyrim, so you might not know this, but they did improve the conversation system in Skyrim. Time didn’t pause, the camera didn’t zoom in on NPC faces, you could still look around and characters could perform animations such as walking to and fro during conversations (although it was pretty rare).

So it was better than Oblivion/F3/FNV in that regard, even if the overall feeling was still one of clunkyness in all animations and interactions. I think it’s largely due to limitation in the scripting.

I don’t agree with you often, but this is perfectly right-on. Engines just aren’t about iteration, they’re also about matching mechanisms to expectations. We used to be okay with the limitations you listed, but that isn’t the case anymore. It’s getting in the way of the actual objectives and purpose of the Fallout games.

Regarding the lack of NPC’s. If you played FNV at launch there were (in relative terms) a ton more NPC’s everywhere.
They patched out several hundred to improve console memory performance (same changes on PC because reasons).
The maimed and booby trapped NCR soldiers on the battlefield outside Camp Forlorn Hope – entirely removed. Freeside – almost no generic NPC’s left. Same thing with every other town and settlement. There were a lot more people present at the presidential speech and so on. Thank you consoles and lazy patching!

The animations for all of their characters are universally panned as being functional at best, godawful at worst. Sure, a lot of this can be laid at the feet of the animation team, but one can’t help but wonder if they’re restricted by the tools they’re using.

And I’m pretty sure their dialogue and questing systems are insanely limited because of engine restrictions.

They really need to get with the times.

Edit: and for FUCK’S SAKE, Bethesda now own id software.
That right there should be reason enough to ditch Gamebryo.

I don’t know if it’s Gamebryo’s fault or Bethesda themselves, but their human characters always look pretty terrible and animate unconvincingly. They all looked very closely related, even the non-white characters. They could have a brand new engine and the same completely un-lifelike people who are little more than quest signposts that speak. But then for some reason all the enemies looked fantastic, even in Fallout 3. Hopefully “next gen” will allow them to have more than 5 people on screen and pretend that’s a bustling town or an army.

I’m intrigued, but after finally spending a decent amount of time with Fallout 3 and giving up early with Skyrim, I think I’m safe enough in saying I just “dig” the Bethesda way of doing things, especially the universally rubbish combat in all their games.

Given that modders have have been able to add in much better looking and more varied faces and models (as well as all those horrific manga monstrosities) it can’t be a hard limitation of the engine that makes faces look so wonky.

I feel the same. I would gladly – happily – sacrifice some of the openness of the Fallout games in exchange for the look and handling of something like IdTech5 or even Unreal. Or some proprietary engine the equivalent thereof.

As many small issues as Rage had at launch, the shooting and vehicles felt great. And the world was fairly large. Sure, they didn’t do much with it – save cordoning it off using canyon walls and other obstacles – but it was large enough that, had they not done so, it could have been something of an open world game, I suppose.

Regardless, as much as I want to play another Fallout game – and I do – I simply cannot abide another game built on an engine as ancient and as fragile as Gamebryo 1.5 (aka, Creation). Not only is shooting a chore in that engine; literally everything is a chore in that engine.

Every quest has its own script, assuring that it operates essentially in a vacuum. Any quest that wants to tie into any other one has to activate or at least reference that script, or a variable affected by that script, in its own script. I am sure you can imagine, then, the possible cascading nightmare that could potentially occur if an early reference in a long chain of them goes awry. Better yet, don’t imagine it; find an old, boxed copy of FO:NV, and play it without patching. Obsidian did a fine thing with all their choices and consequences, and while they are far from perfect technically, they were doubtless hampered – quite severely – by the tech they used. Witness Dungeon Seige III – while not the best game in and of itself, it was very technically sound.

So yeah…Another Fallout would be great. But I won’t play another game on that engine, either.

I would absolutely not be happy with decreased openness – the wide open vistas and the ability to pick a direction and go for a hike to see what you’ll find is the main attraction of Bethesda games for me. I also worry about what a new engine would mean for the modding scene. If those things could be kept intact a more modern and less wonky engine would certainly be a welcome thing.

Skyrim’s engine is a massive improvement over the previous games, but it’s still pretty low quality compared to other game engines. That’s not even mentioning the things that Bethesda broke in patches. The game actually ran perfectly for me at release (which is a first for any Bethesda game) but that went downhill around the 1.08 patch.

To be fair, in Skyrim it felt like they finally got the Gamebryo engine working really well. No glitching, barely ever crashed and the animation detail WAS a lot better than earlier Bethesda games.

I don’t know if I want them to start from scratch on a new engine tbh. Just finetune the Skyrim engine more and more. Add to the new-found stability and really make it shine.

Plus it would be nice if they offered the higher graphical options that mods eventually provide, although there are probably ulterior reasons for why they don’t, to do with cross-platform coverage. Not sure if it’s in their best interests on release day to have one platform that makes the game a million times better looking, but that’s probably a separate debate….

Admittedly I’m going off of videos rather than first-hand experience, but Skyrim still suffered from “every character is a big cylinder”, which made its rotate-on-the-spot play-a-canned-animation collision-mesh-is-nothing-like-it dragons look lousy.

The funny thing is, textures in skyrim are not as bad as people think. The problem is the AWFUL static meshes that stretch and/or twist textures in weird ways. A big part of this is to be blamed on whoever actually mapped the textures onto the models, so I’d assume the modelers.

Honestly, if Bethesda could finally fix all those weird glitches that have been present in the engine since forever – like the “I’m too close to the object to jump on it” bug or the sluggish mouse tracking – i’d be happy with another iteration of the current engine.

I’m not defending it, and I agree that a new engine would be nice — even if not custom built, perhaps a modified version of UE4 or CryEngine even could work — but Bethesda are hardly the only ones who do this.

I’m currently playing FNV and it’s a complete crashfest, to the point I’m fearing I won’t finish it. Shame, because I’m liking it quite a bit. Bethesda should use a decent engine, Fallout 3 and Oblivion were equally bad if not worse for crashes. Skyrim was a bit better, though, but I played it vanilla.

On PC? It should be extremely stable now (whilst the console versions remain glitched heavily). The only bug I found was one that froze the game if you tried loading from the front page. I had to hit ‘start game’ and then ‘load’ the second the worldspace loaded (all of which only added 2-3 seconds to the load-up process, fortunately).

I just finished the main story last year, and it took me literally a dozen tries to get the President Assassination to work correctly. One time even after I saved the President, nothing happened. I mean literally he flew off, and none of the NPCs moved, and nothing happened in regards to the story. On my next load, I killed all of the assassins (and no one else) but got shot at by the NCR Rangers. The bugs went on and on. One of them, the Ranger I was supposed to meet was stuck off in the god damn wastes, like miles away from the checkpoint at the Hoover Dam where he was supposed to be standing.

And don’t even get me started on the fricken General you’re supposed to talk to. I had to reset her character and my saved game 5 times before she was finally in her office, and on the 6th try when she finally WAS in her office, I couldn’t even talk to her. Nothing I did or pressed would illicit a response from her as she just calmly walked out of her office like she wasn’t even supposed to be there.

I loved Fallout: New Vegas, but my god, the bugs. The fucking bugs make Fallout 3 look absolutely stable by comparison.

They’re not. If how buggy a game FO:NV is is ever in doubt, just random-walk through the quests on that wiki and read the bugs sections. I was lucky enough to only hit one, which I could fix with the console. (For The Republic, Part 2 got jammed such that Colonel Moore didn’t realize I’d got the Kahns on my side. FWIW they then showed up at the dam and fought the NCR, not Legion, who slaughtered them, so it still went wrong.)

Weirdly, the PS3 version of New Vegas is the most stable one I’ve played. The 360 version was practically unplayable as it would lock the system (i.e. have to unplug it from the mains) sometimes when doing such wild and crazy things as going through doors.

On PC, I -really- had difficulty with it, which admittedly may be due to a mod, but I only installed a few — mostly bugfixes and additional radio music. It’d just randomly crash or spaz out or whatever at arbitrary intervals.

The PS3 one is still buggy, but it only loses its shit occasionally, which is a hell of an improvement.

You must be playing with mods. If you use Freeside Open or similar ressourcehungry mods, disable them. Make sure to not be in Freeside while deactivating FSO, else you’ll find yourself in an odd level …

If anyone is abit tech savvy and inspects the webpage. You’ll find a cascading style sheet (.css) called “fallout.css”. Whether its someone at Bethesda being ironic or its genuinely a silly error by employee is anyones guess.

If they make a new fallout I hope they will create more interesting environments this time around.
I know it’s supposed to be post-apocalyptic but does that really have to mean that it can only be grey-brownish desolate areas?

Why not have more destroyed cities, that really look like someone used to live there. Why isn’t nature trying to claim back the world with more plants, generally more green and why aren’t there several biomes? There could be post-nuclear swamps, deserts, forests, mountains with glaciers etc. Oh, how I wish they would try that.

I don’t think environmental variety is really a thing with Bethesda, even outside of the Fallout universe. I’m tempted to say it’s because of that ancient engine they use for the majority of their games, but it could just come down to lack of ingenuity on the part of their developers.

What? Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Skyrim are all totally different kinds of environments, and even within each of those games there was a fair amount of variety. Compare the Bitter Coast to the Ashlands, or Downtown DC to suburban Maryland, or the Rift to the Pale.

I can see the point of a lot of criticisms of Bethesda, but one thing they do well is environment, and environmental diversity. They don’t just do grey and brown, except when they do for thematic reasons, and in that case it still contrasts with other non grey and brown.

Fallout 3 really was relentlessly dreary and some variation and vegetation would have made it a bit more interesting. They did a pretty good job with differentiating the different regions in Skyrim though.

So I checked some of the links that were in the HTML code of the page. Some of them lead to preparetothefuture dot com, which redirects to the Fallout category of the Bethesda website. (If you want to check to, line 124 to 130)

I couldn’t for the life of me get into Fallout 3, much like Oblivion, but then New Vegas ate a significant chunk of my time and Skyrim is 200 hours and going, about the only game I played more is Civ (any of them). I’m hoping that whenever Fallout 4 comes out it won’t be the one I skip. Regardless though I’m excited.

Close to bugger all, seeing how almost every rumour that sprang up about regarding the location pointed to its being set around Boston, and Bethesda’s statements on how they would like to keep their Fallout on the East Coast.

I’d love to see one set in Florida, personally. I was always a bit disappointed that Fallout Tactics 2 got cancelled.

If set around Miami they could’ve gone for a retro-Vice City look. I know Fallout’s supposed to be 1950s to the core, but New Vegas edged things into the early 60s for much of its aesthetic and it didn’t hurt the franchise at all, so I don’t see how it can’t work (it’s not like I’d expect them to have Flock of Seagulls on the radio stations.) Just slap neon everywhere — it worked for Vegas — and make the ambient soundtrack a lot of creepy FM synth. Still recognizably 50s but with a touch of 80s as well — and Fallout has always had influence from post-50s material.

If you click “view page source” you can see that “fallout” and “bethesda” are written.
So it’s either a definite teaser or a hoax.
Although after teasing tiny tiny bits of it for the past year it’s probably real.

This time, can we have a small number of companions with some actual dialogue and maybe even some quest lines (FNV style), rather than 975 different companions, all with 1 line of dialogue and no quests? (Skyrim style)

I kind of bounced off of Fallout 3, went straight through to Fallout:NV and loved every minute of it. Perhaps I’m biased because I still love Neverwinter Nights 2 to this day.

Last year I returned to Fallout 3. I had a much better time than my first attempt. I had a really good bunch of mods and a lot of stuff to do. In general, I just didn’t have as much investment into characters besides your ‘dad’ and a few other characters. In New Vegas, I would seriously become intrigued by random people and their goals. I would uncover places I wanted to explore, not places I wanted to raid for weapons and supplies. In all, I came to appreciate Fallout 3 and I’m glad I gave it another chance, but NV just felt like a better experience.

RPS loves this debate, I’ve seen it multiple times. I’m on the FO:NV side of the argument, though I love both. Currently though I just wish Wasteland 2 would get through beta. I’m playing the re-release of Wasteland 1 currently. For a 20y/o game it’s still not half bad once you get used to it.

A friend of mine pointed out that this site is being hosted in Poland, the domain was registered through GoDaddy, and some of the Javascript is written in Polish. All of these things are completely abnormal compared to all of Zenimax’s websites though the domain does appear to be owned by Zenimax. Will domain registrars accept fake contact information for domains? I guess only time will tell if it’s fake.

The image under the time is the vault-tech logo, and it’s file name is vt.png. It’s definitely fallout something, but whether or not it’s a prank remains to be seen. Just like the article pokes fun at, there’s virtually no way Fallout 4 isn’t happening one way or another. Skyrim was in development before Fallout 3 came out, so I don’t doubt that Fallout 4 is in the works, or will be, probably soon.

Cheers! Can’t wait for another poorly written and bug ridden wonky shooter with half a dozen, sometimes almost somewhat interesting, npcs per town and scarce bullet sponge enemies here and there which have the worst animations that a 100 million dollars can buy.

Of course I’m a real human. And yes, I do have a taste for clunky and half-arsed games.

Also, I forgot to mention: Know that rudimentary and inviable melee combat system, that nonsensical sneaking system and those 100% indestructible environments full of prefabs? I love them too! LOVE THEM!

Seriously now. I actually do like Bethesda’s Fallout, but the way most people simply overlook it’s gaping flaws disturbs me.

I have hype fatigue. It would make me SO HAPPY if the upcoming announcement was of a very-soon release date, if not the launch of the game itself, instead of their signal to commence shelling us with mechanics leaks, teasers, ‘sizzle’ trailers, ARGs, retailer-exclusive pre-order DLC announcements, selling season passes, dev diaries, bizarre PR stunts, and all the other bullshit that rains down on our heads for a solid year before we can actually buy and play a AAA game these days, to the point that we’re already kind of bored with it before we get started.

who ever published this story is a complete idiot. DUDE a sequel to their best selling game? fuck right off. there was fallout 1 and fallout 2, expansions for both mind you. if anything they made their franchise better by making sequels you dip shit. if you want to be a journalist start fucking thinking you stupid twat.